Daijisen

The Daijisen (大辞泉^?, "Great fountain of knowledge(wisdom)/source of words") is a general-purpose Japanese dictionary published by Shogakukan in 1995 and 1998. It was designed as an "all-in-one" dictionary for native speakers of Japanese, especially high school and university students.

Shogakukan intended for the Daijisen to directly compete with Iwanami's popular Kōjien desktop dictionary, which was a bestseller through three editions (1955, 1969, 1983). The Daijisen followed upon the success of two other Kōjien competitors, Sanseido's Daijirin ("Great forest of words", 1988, 1995, 2006) and Kōdansha's color-illustrated Nihongo daijiten ("Great dictionary of Japanese", 1989, 1995). All of these dictionaries weigh around one kilogram and have about 3000 pages.

The 1st edition Daijisen (1995) included over 220,000 entries and 6000 all-color illustrations and photographs. The chief editor Akira Matsumura (松村明^?, Matsumura Akira, 1916–2001) was also chief editor of the directly competing Daijirin dictionary. Other Daijisen editors included Akihiko Ikegami (池上秋彦), Hiroshi Kaneda (金田弘), and Kazuo Sugizaki (杉崎一雄). Shogakukan also released a CD-ROM version (1997) of the 1st edition.

The "enlarged and revised" edition Daijisen (1998) was more of a revision than an enlargement, with 2978 pages versus 2938 in the 1st edition. Both editions claim "over 220,000 headwords".

The Daijisen and Daijirin have much more in common than Matsumura's lexicographical supervision and similar ("Great fountain/forest of words") titles. These two dictionaries share many features of design and content. Both arrange word meanings with the most frequent ones first (like the American Heritage Dictionary), in contrast to the Kōjien tradition of arranging with the oldest recorded meanings first (like the Oxford English Dictionary). Compare their two respective definitions of hyōsetsu (剽窃 "plagiarize").

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